Business Jet Traveler

Summer days can be quite warm in northern California's inland valleys, even those that lie fairly near the coast. By evening, though, the warm, moist air is cooled by the bitterly cold Pacific Ocean, resulting in a thick bank of offshore fog.

A Brazilian court has indicted ExcelAire pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino for their alleged role in the mid-air collision of an Embraer Legacy and a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 over the Amazon jungle last September 29. Joe Sharkey, a New York Times writer on assignment for this magazine, was a passenger aboard the business jet.

Even as the FCC and FAA continue to find reasons not to approve in-flight use of personal cellphones, European authorities apparently have no such qualms. At the Paris Air Show in June, mobile telephony service provider OnAir announced that the European Aviation Safety Authority has certified the airborne GSM equipment that supports OnAir services for use on the Airbus A318.

Starting a company was the last thing on William Herp's mind when he caught the aviation bug in 1996. In fact, he'd already launched several businesses and was in the midst of a break from his entrepreneurial efforts.

Airbus CEO John Leahy has confirmed that the company will be converting a giant A380 airliner to an executive/VIP role for an unnamed buyer. While there are unconfirmed reports about the buyer's identity, Leahy would say only that he is neither American nor European and the airplane would be for his personal use.

A couple of years from now, will you be zipping around between meetings on one of the new very light jets? Assuming you already fly privately, the answer is probably no, according to many of the panelists at the recent Business Models for VLJs and Light Jets, a sold-out two-day conference in West Palm Beach, Fla.

If your car is less than 10 years old, there might be a little computer buried somewhere inside that records events. If you're in a crash, the police, the insurance adjustor, or maybe even the National Transportation Safety Board will retrieve that computer, download its data and use it to figure out exactly what happened.

Arinc's new, slimmer Ku-band antenna design for its SKYLink satellite in-flight broadband service is now available. The original antenna, created for Gulfstream, allows a fit in a wider range of tail-mounted radomes on other aircraft, including the Dassault Falcon Jet line and Bombardier's Global and Challenger models.

A bill being considered by the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure would give local authorities the right to enforce a nighttime curfew at New York's Westchester County Airport. Almost immediately after H.R.